Chương 29: Translation Shortcut

Ch 29: Translation Shortcut A week had passed. And with three days now left until the start of the tournament, I stood in front of what looked like nothing more than an unremarkable wall. Sahirah, Zira, and Niko were behind me, the three of them staring at the glorious wall I was showing them with increasingly confused expressions. They exchanged glances as if silently wondering whether I had finally gone insane by bringing them here. I smiled at their reactions.

"Welcome to my humble gambling ring," I said, pointing toward the wall before sweeping my hand toward it.

"Just walk straight through."

"Are you feeling well, human?" Zira was the first to express her confusion, assuming something was wrong with me.

"Did someone hit you on the head, my friend?" Niko was no different, although a disease wasn't his first assumption. Sahirah, on the other hand, stepped closer to me and reached out with one hand, touching the wall like the smart girl she was. Her eyes widened as her hand passed straight through it, the wall's surface deforming around her arm as if the entire wall were made of water. I smiled. Sahirah was too familiar with my illusion spell by now.

She was able to realize that I wasn't particularly crazier than usual today and that the wall didn't actually exist.

"Ladies first." I attempted a joke, stepping aside with an exaggerated flourish and presenting the fake wall that was actually a doorway with an open palm. It didn't land. She simply crossed through the illusion with a serious expression, a consequence of our still-pending conversation about our future. Neither of us had mentioned that conversation during the previous week, but I knew she suspected my new gambling-ring side project was just an excuse to avoid answering her questions.

Neither of us had acknowledged that out loud, though. Meanwhile, still staring in disbelief at the fact that Sahirah had disappeared into the wall, Zira and Niko remained oblivious to the small piece of hostile communication that had just passed between us.

"W-what have you done this time, human?" Zira continued staring in disbelief for a good while, so Niko took the lead and approached the wall. He first touched it and watched his hand pass straight through. Then he immediately walked inside, disappearing just like Sahirah.

"Your turn, since elf ladies apparently go last." She was already used to me calling her our golden-goose elf, so she remained more concerned about the illusion wall than anything I said. She hesitantly approached it, touched it once, then again, then three more times in rapid succession before finally stopping and slowly entering the room. I sighed and followed her inside. The transition was unremarkable, just a slight mental disorientation as my eyes adjusted to the dim room beyond the illusion.

The place slowly revealed itself as a room where the Greys stored cleaning equipment, from buckets and brooms to what looked like their version of chemical cleaning fluids. Most of it had already been removed and moved elsewhere by Kip and Kap. They were the ones who had helped the weak human deal with the heavy stuff, making this room the perfect location for my gambling ring.

And the best thing about this place was that it was so unremarkable that no one had bothered including it in the surveillance orb in Principal Dickhead's office.

"What are those glowing fruits?" Sahirah had stopped in front of one of the magic circles attached to the wall. From where I stood, I could see nothing except the glow of mana, but I smiled anyway.

"The icons are vibrant, aren't they?" I said.

"If you pull the illusory lever, something interesting will happen." Sahirah looked around, and when she understood what I meant, I saw her hand move as she grabbed at empty air. Her eyes went wide.

"They're spinning! They're spinning!" She couldn't resist smiling, forgetting for a moment that she was supposed to be angry with me. Meanwhile, Zira and Niko watched from a corner, completely unable to understand the immersive experience Sahirah was having. I simply watched her play, thinking about the days it had taken to get the illusion-made slot machines to this level of functionality. Those damn icons had been incredibly difficult to get right.

I had designed them through an interactive illusion in my mind, similar to my Mind Library, then stored the finished design in a data crystal hidden inside a small hole in the wall. Now it could be loaded every time the Slot Machine spell was activated.

"The four fruits are in a line. The illusion says I won. So, a girl gets something now, right?" Sahirah suddenly stepped back and stared at me with shining eyes. I said awkwardly, "This is just a test to show you guys how it works, but if you want a kiss, you can get one." The excitement in her eyes died instantly. She pouted, crossed her arms, and made the expression of someone who had just decided she wouldn't interact with that particular illusion again anytime soon.

Luckily, Niko saved the day by speaking before things became truly awkward.

"Why are you showing us this room, Eric?" Zira supported the question with a silent glance, though she seemed quite interested in trying the illusion herself.

"This is what we're going to do during the tournament," I said.

"The two of you and the rest of the sales team are going to identify potential clients outside, among the nobles and merchants, and bring them here to this room." This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. I smiled.

"I studied Grey law during the past few days, and apparently gambling isn't illegal, since no one ever invented casinos and automatic gambling machines in Navar." I couldn't help sounding proud of myself.

"But keeping this place secret is for the best. Besides, it'll serve as training for the sales team and prepare us for the real-world problems we're going to face in the future."

"Ah... what do you mean by real-world problems?" Zira and the others didn't know much about the things I knew. Elitha's story about her past and that terrifying thing they had done to her, sensorial death, wasn't something I had shared, not even with Sahirah, since I wasn't sure whether Elitha would be angry if I did. But one thing I had decided for myself was that, from now on, I would take everything much more seriously when it came to the security of everyone around me.

And while this gambling operation might be morally questionable at worst rather than illegal, I would treat getting caught as if it were a death sentence. I would do this for the sake of the company, creating a culture of self-protection even now, while there weren't many of us. That way, if we were ever forced to do something that pissed off the Grey nobles in the future, no one would screw things up when actual lives were on the line.

"For now," I said, "just think of it as a game. And if none of the teachers or Principal Dickhead discover this place during the tournament, each of you will get a couple thousand credits as a performance bonus."

"Thousand?" Niko repeated the word as if he couldn't believe his ears.

"Of course," I said.

"As much as the average Grey is a bureaucracy-obsessed lunatic, I think a fair number of them will be susceptible to gambling. And nobles with credits to spare even more so." Zira asked, "And how much will we charge them to bring them to this room?" A large smile spread across my face.

"Nothing," I explained.

"I'll integrate a credit crystal into each of the slot machines, and you just observe while they have fun by themselves." Sahirah, as if deciding she had ignored me for long enough, finally joined the conversation.

"What if they want to bet on the winners of the tournament? Or if they get angry when they lose?" I smiled again, the largest smile yet.

"I'll add another spell that will allow them to buy positions on winners and losers, and I will also add a third illusion spell that makes sure they never find this room again if they are blacklisted." I said.

"But we're the ones who will make nearly all the credits regardless." The three of them just stared at me as if I had suggested a robbery, and Niko let out a huff.

"Are you going to cheat them out of their credits?"

"What? What kind of human do you all think I am?" I asked. No one said anything in my defense. I let out a sigh.

"No. We're going to win fair and square." My gaze landed on Sahirah, and I pointed at her.

"With Sahirah participating in this tournament and me providing her with spells, do any of you seriously believe anyone else can win this thing?" Every face suddenly broke into a smile. Because with Sahirah on our team, we didn't even need to cheat. We just had to collect the credits of whoever was foolish enough to bet against her.

The fourth floor of Elitha's tower had become my everyday place of study, where I kept pushing my knowledge of runes forward, analyzing the modules of the translation spell and constantly copying parts of it both to my Mind Library and onto actual paper in case I ran out of mana and the whole thing was erased. During this first week of studying, I had made little progress, even though by now I understood most of the spell's workings.

It worked at scale, identifying targets, plucking the intentions behind each sentence they uttered, and then translating them through the archmage before sending the new version to each identified listener in a customized format according to their language. There was no need to study the detailed workings of the large-area targeting. I was too far away from accomplishing something like that, and I didn't think even Sahirah had enough mana to maintain such a spell, much less the required brainpower.

So I decided that part could simply be skipped. For now, I would be more than happy with a small radius of translation around the spheres. But even with that extreme reduction in complexity, the original translation spell was still far beyond my current capabilities. This much was obvious as I observed the full 3D projection hovering in the air while I remained seated on the ground.

I simply lacked the brainpower to use my own mind as a supercomputer, constantly acting as a huge server that processed translation requests all the time. So the only viable solution was to reduce the complexity of the translation spell itself, making it simple enough for someone like me to use. My idea was simple: get rid of the client-server architecture and create a peer-to-peer version of the spell.

This way, each person holding one of my system spheres would broadcast their own feelings and intentions every time they spoke, reducing the complexity even further. After all, everyone in the software industry knew that client-side processing was basically infinite. If your server couldn't handle something, you just wrote some custom JavaScript that made the client's browser do the heavy lifting while your own server was spared from burning electricity and generating heat. I smiled at my genius idea.

But the smile didn't last long. Even with peer-to-peer optimization plus client-side processing, it still wasn't enough. The part that plucked intentions from people's brains and transmitted them was already approaching the limit of what a first-year student's brain could handle. Add translation on top of that, and we were looking at a brain-frying scenario. It seemed like an impossible problem to solve. Perhaps I would need to reach the third stage of dual cultivation just to be able to do it.

But there was a paradox right there. I needed the translation spell first to fix things with Sahirah before we could advance any further. So how was I supposed to solve an impossible problem that might require us to advance before I could even solve it? I sighed, thinking about the last crazy idea I had come up with during the week. What if I got rid of the translation step entirely? It sounded crazy, but I swear I hadn't lost my mind to this problem yet.

The idea was to convey untranslated intentions without actually translating them, eliminating the need for a customized illusion of sound that would be customized differently for each species. The spell would broadcast a raw snapshot of the speaker's mental state, and everyone within the receiving range would get the exact same version of it. Then their own brains would handle the understanding and interpretation. At the end of the day, there would be no actual translation happening.

Just a clever transmission of intentions, with the recipient's brain filling in the gaps using their own language and imagination. It sounded complicated, but the concept itself wasn't that difficult. For example, if one of the Granar said that their scales were itchy, the spell would broadcast the raw concept of itching and the fact that it was happening to the Granar.

Then an illusion in the listener's brain would convince itself that the Granar had spoken about itching, while the actual voice would simply be the listener's brain filling in the gaps with something familiar to them. Essentially, I would be skipping the translation itself. I smiled awkwardly. Could my idea even be called a translation spell anymore? Or was it just an illusion spell pretending to be a translation spell and faking it until it worked?

Communication could still happen, but perhaps some nuances of meaning would be lost, and misunderstandings could easily happen depending on how the listener's brain filled in the gaps. What remained to be seen was how significant those limitations would be in practice, because the idea was good enough that it deserved to be tested with several prototypes. As I smirked to myself, thinking about my next steps for implementing and testing the idea, a voice sounded from everywhere at once.

"You got an idea, little lamb?" she said.

"But whatever it is, it will have to wait, because the rest of your afternoon belongs to me now." It was the same as every day. She would remind me whenever it was time to forget about the translation spell and dedicate my attention to inspiring her with my knowledge and ideas.

"All right," I said.

"I'll be there in a minute." As I was about to climb the stairs, she spoke again.

"You remain where you are today." I frowned. This was the first time she hadn't asked me to climb the stairs and walk to the highest floor of the tower.

"And why is that?" I asked.

"Check this," she said. The translation spell suddenly became smaller, its floating runes decreasing in size as another spell on another platform was magnified. It took me only a few minutes to understand what I was looking at. Elitha had definitely outdone herself this time.

"Your suggestion worked, little lamb." For a moment, I could swear I caught a hint of gratitude in Elitha's voice. She continued, "The reason my listening spell felt so poor in quality compared to my lost hearing was because what you defined as the sampling rate was too low." She laughed.

"This version samples air vibrations several thousand times per heartbeat, and from several different places at once." Then she added, "I think the illusion of hearing it provides me is better than my actual hearing ever was." My eyes widened. The implications were severe. After only a week of talking to her, Elitha Hearthstrong had already recovered one of her five senses. I froze in place. Was I really helping the most powerful archmage in the kingdom regain the basic abilities she had lost?

And if so, what would she do to the people who had hurt her once she recovered fully? Still, hearing was the absolute easiest sense to fix, that much was true. But the fact remained that one of her five senses had been restored because I helped her. And only now did I realize that, regardless of how much I believed Elitha deserved her revenge, whatever she did in the future, I would be partially responsible for it.